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Monday, 20 September 2010

World Plant Duplicates

The real number of flowering plants is down to about 400,000 after scientists remove more than 600,000 species from the dictionary of life. Although the existence of duplicates has been long known it has taken until now for a comprehensive review to establish where these are.

The project - which has taken nearly three years - was the number one request made by the 193 government members of the Convention on Biological Diversity at their meeting in 2002. There were concerns that without this work, it would be impossible to work out how many plants were under threat and how successful conservationists were in saving them.

In having multiple names it also makes it much more difficult for researchers to find information - sometimes missing up to 80% if only searching with the most common name of a species. Remember that when conducting literature searches it's always useful to structure a search that will encompass both its common and scientific name. To learn more about successful database searching why not have a look at our Information Skills Resource.